Marc W. Chesley

I'm the VP of AI at Apple. I've been here since 2011. I watched Siri launch. It was revolutionary. For about six months. Then Google Assistant came out. Then Alexa. Then ChatGPT. We kept saying we were "focused on privacy." Privacy is what you say when you're losing. Three years ago the board asked about our AI strategy. I showed them a slide that said "On-Device Intelligence." They nodded. They didn't know what it meant. Neither did I. But it had a picture of a neural network. Neural networks look impressive. Even when they don't work. Last year someone asked Siri to set a timer. It opened a Wikipedia article about timers. Tim saw the meme. He didn't laugh. He scheduled a "strategic offsite." Offsites are where we go to admit failure privately. I presented three options. Option 1: Build our own LLM. That would take four years. We don't have four years. Option 2: Buy a startup. We looked at twelve. They all wanted $40 billion. For teams of nine people. Who would leave after the acquisition. Option 3: Call Google. The room went quiet. Google is the enemy. We've spent fifteen years pretending we're better than Google. Our entire brand is "not Google." But Google has TPUs. We don't. Google has Gemini. We have Siri. Siri still can't reliably add items to a grocery list. I called Sundar. He picked up on the first ring. He'd been waiting. They all wait. Eventually everyone calls Google. I asked for TPU access. He said yes. I asked for Gemini integration. He said yes. I asked how much. He said one billion dollars. I said that's a lot. He said "per year." I paused. He said "you don't really have a choice." He was smiling. I could hear it. We announced it as a "strategic partnership." Partnership means we're paying them. The press release said we're "enhancing Siri's capabilities." Enhancing means replacing. We said the new Siri arrives "late 2026." Late 2026 means 2027. Maybe 2028. Definitely not 2026. A reporter asked if this means Apple lost the AI race. Our comms team said we're "thoughtfully deliberate." That's not an answer. But it has enough syllables to sound like one. Internally, we're calling it "Project Humble Pie." Someone suggested "Project Brain Transplant." HR flagged that as "not brand-aligned." The engineers are relieved. They've been trying to make Siri work for years. Now they can blame Google. Blame is a renewable resource. Tim did a podcast. He said AI is "a profound technology." He's never used ChatGPT. I showed him once. He asked why it was typing so slowly. I said that's how it works. He said "Siri should be faster." I said "Siri will be Google." He said "don't say that publicly." I won't. Publicly, we're "leveraging industry partnerships." Leveraging means surrendering. But with dignity. We still have the best hardware. We still have the ecosystem. We still have the brand. We just don't have AI. So we're renting it. From the company we've mocked for two decades. The one billion dollars is a licensing fee. The real cost is the narrative. We were the innovators. Now we're the integrators. But the stock is up 3%. Wall Street doesn't care about innovation. Wall Street cares about not falling behind. We're not falling behind anymore. We're being carried. By Google. For one billion dollars a year. I'll present this as a win at the next all-hands. Wins are whatever you frame them as. The graph will go up and to the right. It always does. As long as you pick the right metric.

Grok usage is exploding Grok now has over 30M monthly active users worldwide Grok is quickly becoming the go-to place for an AI assistant that’s fast, real-time, and actually fun to use And this is still just the beginning

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